Spotify: P2P music-on-demand streaming

Spotify: P2P music-on- demand streaming Ricardo Santos – Spotify @ricardovice

Basic requirements • Lots of music • Available everywhere, with great user interfaces • More convenient than piracy • Fast start of playback • High availability (enough nines to put CDs in the basement) • Large scale (many many users)

The music • Over 10 million tracks • Growing every day, around 10k per day • 96-320 kbps audio streams, most are Ogg Vorbis q5, 160kbps

Accessibility • People should always be able to access music • Whenever they want • Wherever they are

but enough with the marketing talk...

Latency matters • High latency can be a problem, not only in First Person Shooters • Increased latency of Google searches by 100 – 400ms decreased usage by 0.2 – 0.6% (Jake Brutlag, 2009) • Slow performance is one of the major reasons users abandon services • Users don't come back

Latency matters • Focus on low latency • On average, the human notion of “instantly” is 200ms • 265ms The median latency to begin play a track in Spotify is • Due to disk lookup, at times it's actually faster to start playing a track from network than from disk • The SLA is maintained by monitoring latency in the client

Playing a track • Check local cache • Request ﬁrst piece from Spotify servers • Meanwhile, search P2P for remainder • Switch between servers & P2P as needed • Towards the end of a track, start pre- fetching the next one via P2P rather than our servers

When to start playing? • Trade off between stutter & latency • Look at last 15 min of transfer rates • Model as Markov chain and simulate • Coupled with some heuristics

Production storage • Production storage is a cache with fast drives & lots of RAM • Serves the most popular content • A cache miss will generate a request to master storage • User will experience longer latency • Production storage is available in several data centers to ensure closeness to the user (latency wise)

Master storage • Works as a DHT, with some redundancy • Contains all available tracks but has slower drives and access • Tracks are kept in several formats, adding up to around 290TB

P2P helps • Easier to scale • Less servers • Less bandwidth • Better uptime • Less costs • Fun!

P2P overview • Not a piracy network, all tracks are added by Spotify • Used on all desktop clients (no mobile) • Each client connected to <= 60 others • All nodes are equals (no super nodes) • A track is downloaded from several peers

P2P custom protocol • Ask for most urgent pieces ﬁrst • If a peer is slow, re-request from new peers • When buffers run low, download from central servers • If loading from servers, estimate at what point P2P will catch up • If buffers are very low, stop uploading

P2P ﬁnding peers • Partial central tracker (BitTorrent-style) • Broadcast query in small neighborhood (Gnutella-style) • Two mechanisms results in higher availability • Limited broadcast for local (LAN) peer discovery (cherry on top...)

P2P security • The client needs to be able to play music, but we have to prevent reverse engineering from doing the same • Therefor we can't openly discuss the details (Security Trough Obscurity) but... • Closed environment • Verify integrity of downloaded ﬁles • Data transfers are encrypted • assigned pseudonym Usernames are not exposed in P2P network, all peers

So, what's the outcome? • At over 10 million users the responses are • 55.4% from client cache • 35.8% from the P2P network • 8.8% from the servers

I'd like to know more... • Get in touch with us • Checkout Gunnar Kreitz's slides and academic papers on the subject: http://www.csc.kth.se/~gkreitz/spotify-p2p10/

Oh, and we have cake as well! :D spotify.com/jobs jobs@spotify.com

Spotify: P2P music-on-demand streaming

by Ricardo Vice Santos on Nov 12, 2010

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Spotify: P2P music-on-demand streaming — Presentation Transcript